Parsing Large XML files w/ Ruby & Nokogiri

Question

I have a large XML file (about 10K rows) I need to parse regularly that is in this format:

    10000         


        

Answer 1

I'd recommend using a SAX parser rather than a DOM parser for a file this large. Nokogiri has a nice SAX parser built in: http://nokogiri.org/Nokogiri/XML/SAX.html

The SAX way of doing things is nice for large files simply because it doesn't build a giant DOM tree, which in your case is overkill; you can build up your own structures when events fire (for counting nodes, for example).